For more than seven hours, Columbine High School graduate Glenn Sanchez and 10 other members of a U.S. Navy P-3 surveillance aircraft were the first and only U.S. presence above the Maersk Alabama and the lifeboat carrying Somali pirates and Capt. Richard Phillips.

The P-3 had been 700 miles from the Maersk Alabama when the freighter first signaled it was being hijacked last month.

As the aircraft raced toward the American cargo ship, Sanchez and the P-3 crew listened as the pirates mocked the American seamen.

“They were using profanity in English and mocking everything they said,” Sanchez, a Navy petty officer from Littleton, recalled today. “If the Americans would make a distress call like, ‘Help us, this is the Maersk Alabama,’ they would come back and, using a whiny, baby voice, mock them, using profanity and other obscene things.”

Once over the Maersk Alabama, Sanchez and the P-3 crew kept in touch with the USS Bainbridge, which was steaming toward the ship, and tried to comfort the Alabama crew.

“We actually would call them (the Alabama) every 15 minutes, letting them know the P-3 was there and that we weren’t going anywhere — that they wouldn’t be by themselves ever again, that they would have the U.S. with them the whole way,” said Sanchez.

When they first arrived, the P-3 stayed “covert.”

But once they found out that Phillips had been taken by the pirates and placed in a lifeboat, they were ordered to break cover and buzz the pirates.

Sanchez was operating the plane’s radar, which located the Alabama and the lifeboat. He also was operating the aircraft’s special sensing equipment, which picked up the body heat from the pirates on the lifeboat.

As the P-3 continually swooped over the pirates, the plane turned on its top and bottom strobe lights and landing lights.

“A couple of pirates were hanging out the back of the lifeboat, and there was one pirate in the front of the boat, and he had the hatch open,” Sanchez recalled. “We could pick up their body heat signatures. They definitely knew we were there.”

Sanchez, whose wife, Sarah, lives in Littleton, as does his stepfather and mom, wasn’t the only Colorado resident involved in helping the Maersk Alabama crew and freeing Phillips.

On the USS Bainbridge was Petty Officer Carissa Riedman of Loveland, the Bainbridge’s tactical information coordinator.

For the next five days, Riedman would help coordinate the aircraft and American ships that converged on the Alabama and the lifeboat.

She was on duty when the first distress calls from the Alabama reached the Bainbridge.

Riedman said her reaction and that of the Bainbridge crew was one of astonishment that the pirates had taken on an American vessel.

“All of us were like, ‘Are they crazy? Messing with us?’ It was like, ‘What are they thinking?’ ”

During five tense days, Riedman said she hardly slept; she spent her time scanning and watching the lifeboat.

She thought “this could be my father, this could be somebody’s husband. He is one of us. He is a fellow American,” Riedman recalled Tuesday in a phone conversation.

It was nerve-racking. The mood of the pirates could change dramatically, said the graduate of Mountain View High School in Loveland.

“Some days, they’d be kind of laid back,” said Riedman. “Keep in mind, it is extremely hot down here, especially with them being in the enclosed lifeboat. It was basically, ‘We want this, we want that, or otherwise, we are going to kill the American. Any time they would threaten to harm Capt. Phillips, that was the most stressful. We wanted to get him out of there as quickly as possible but with the situation, that wasn’t easy.”

Riedman said the bottom-line demand from the pirates was safe passage back to land “but we weren’t about to have that.”

She said that Bainbridge was able to attach a tow rope to the lifeboat with the pirates’ blessing after the U.S. made a calculated effort to fool them.

“That was about the time we told them they were headed — we kind of tricked them — in the wrong direction,” said Riedman.

Riedman said the Bainbridge also had to keep an eye on other pirates who were threatening to attack.

“The pirates on the lifeboat said that their brothers and their comrades were going to come and save them and take care of us,” said Riedman. “We heard some talk between them and other pirates saying, ‘Oh, just hang in there, we’ll be there.’ ”

On the evening of the fifth day, the drama ended as Navy SEALS shot dead the pirates remaining on the lifeboat.

There was an immediate sense of relief on the Bainbridge when the crew knew Phillips was safe, said the petty officer.

“It was a sigh of relief. Once we got word that he (Phillips) was on board and he was OK, it was like everyone could breathe again.”

The two Coloradans said they and their families couldn’t be happier that Phillips was rescued and that they were able to be part of it.

“I told my mom, and she went crazy,” said Sanchez, speaking of his mother, Littleton’s Jennifer Gaughen. “She was telling everybody. It feels good to have done this, and it ended perfectly.”

Riedman said her mother, Diane Hull of Loveland, kept e-mailing her with the basic message, “Be safe, my girl. I love you.”

Riedman met Capt. Phillips briefly while he was on the Bainbridge. She said he reminded her of her father, Mike Hull of Loveland.

She recalled: “Capt. Phillips reminded me a lot of my father, the way his humor was. It was kind of like a warm feeling.”

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